Helping every kind of family to raise happy, healthy and confident kids

I’m delighted to have an article published on Red Tricycle this week. You can read the first section below, but if you want to read the whole article, why not jump over to Red Tricycle and take a look?

Did you know that babies learn faster during their first year of life than at almost any other time? Helping your baby make the most of this wonderful learning period gives them a good foundation for their later development.

So here are 10 important things you can do with your baby before they can walk or talk, to help set them up positively for later learning.

1. Make eye contact

Even the very youngest baby instinctively responds to eye contact – when a baby is seven hours old he’s already interested in his mother’s face and may even mimic facial expressions! Looking into your baby’s eyes is a beautiful way to develop a strong emotional bond between you both.

As your baby gets older, you can begin to play games such as ‘Peep-Bo’, which helps him begin to understand the concept of hiding things, and will also produce a storm of delighted giggles.

If you’d like to know about nine more things you can do with your young baby, carry on reading at Red Tricycle.

One of my earliest memories is of playing with my Granddad. Already well into his 70s when I was born, he wasn’t a real natural with children. But he loved being around his grandchildren and sometimes (usually with a little awkwardness), he tried to entertain us.

One day, when I was very small, he sat me on his knee, and began to sing the nursery rhyme ‘Two little dickie birds’. He’d stuck a small piece of paper to each forefinger, and as he sang ‘Fly away Peter, fly away Paul’, he lifted his fingers over his shoulders, then returned them with the paper mysteriously missing. As he sang ‘Come back’ to the birds, they ‘reappeared’ on his fingers.

I was dumbfounded! My Granddad was so magical he could make paper birds disappear and reappear on his fingers! It was many years later I realised he must have simply swapped fingers!

It’s National Baking Week! And surely there’s no better activity to do with your kids than a little homemade baking. Of course, you may have to put up with a some chaos, and spend a while cleaning up afterwards, but nothing beats the joy of sitting down to a cup of tea and delicious home-made cake.

If you’re busy, it’s not always easy to choose a recipe, so I’ve done a round-up of 25 beautiful baking recipes to make life easy for you. Being British, I’ve focused on finding some traditional recipes from the UK, which may not be familiar to you if you live elsewhere.

It’s National Poetry Day! I’ve always loved poetry. My mum says I could repeat many poems from A.A. Milne’s ‘When We Were Very Young’ by heart before I was two years old. So I thought about which poem to share with you today and decided on one of my autumn favourites – ‘Blackberry Picking’ by Seamus Heaney.